Hacker News: albumen

New comment by albumen in "Three schoolgirls in Kinsale pulled up a pea plant covered in warts (2016)"

albumen — Thu, 03 Sep 2026 09:13:33 +0000

Lots of news sites aren't AI written; or if AI is involved, it's not as blatant as in this article. The 'papers of record' largely remain AI-free. You increasingly have to pay for good journalism.

New comment by albumen in "Show HN: I made a retirement simulator: 125 years of data, 25 countries"

albumen — Wed, 26 Aug 2026 18:04:57 +0000

You don’t need to for its quick check, which shows the core feature.

New comment by albumen in "Three important steps in my maturation process"

albumen — Sat, 22 Aug 2026 11:31:48 +0000

This is too simplistic an argument re utilitarianism. It assumes torture definitely works, and that there’s no further consequences. Many utilitarians might say “no” too, given that there is no persuasive evidence that torture is a superior intelligence-gathering method to well-conducted non-coercive interrogation; and that it’s likely to produce unreliable information alongside whatever truths it elicits. It’s a decidedly grey world.

New comment by albumen in "Mycorrhizal Infrastructure Map"

albumen — Tue, 18 Aug 2026 21:17:28 +0000

Very cool. "The resulting map is strongest in well-sampled regions, less certain where samples are sparse. Read more about mapping uncertainty here." I can't access the paper to see what countries were actually sampled. The interactive map implies/shows that large areas weren't sampled (e.g. nowhere in the British Isles). It would be helpful if the map showed the uncertainty of the resulting map, on the map somehow.

New comment by albumen in "The Silicon Valley Founder Meat Grinder"

albumen — Sat, 01 Aug 2026 22:44:04 +0000

But the S&P500 is ~half AI anyway! At least by market cap.

What’s your idea of investing in AI?

New comment by albumen in "Why do we think we understand the world more than we actually do?"

albumen — Tue, 28 Jul 2026 07:19:49 +0000

Don’t be so hard on yourself; the poorly designed glass door did that for you already.

New comment by albumen in "Astronauts describe persistent 'observer' sensation after 6 month missions"

albumen — Tue, 28 Jul 2026 07:01:33 +0000

Cool. Just to note, the video demos Playbook, the proposed replacement for OSTPV.

Here’s OSTPV: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=s2gUOV3KK2k

New comment by albumen in "Show HN: I mapped every US golf course"

albumen — Sun, 26 Jul 2026 08:51:22 +0000

“easily-offended / agitating”? Hmm. There’s lots of good reasons to convert golf courses to low-cost housing, or use the recycled water for something else. Expand irrigation of parks, recharge groundwater, create wetlands, create dual plumbing networks to use the recycled water for toilet flushing etc.

New comment by albumen in "Painting the sides of railroad rails white to reduce derailment"

albumen — Sat, 18 Jul 2026 08:44:18 +0000

Or just have the cyclists use fatter tyres.

New comment by albumen in "Half-Baked Product"

albumen — Fri, 03 Jul 2026 18:51:45 +0000

We installed our dishwasher at hip height, with the cupboard for clean dishes directly above. Bending down is a thing of the past.

The two dishwashers idea is neat, but the cupboard capacity is greater than that of a second dishwasher; and we haven’t got the space!

New comment by albumen in "A 'cold blob' in the Atlantic could be a sign of AMOC shutdown – CNN"

albumen — Sun, 14 Jun 2026 15:15:01 +0000

And yet millions of people still play the lottery.

I don’t think it’s as simple as uncertainty. Nobody wants to change their lifestyle to avert climate change. People prefer carrots to sticks.

New comment by albumen in "Firewood Splitting Simulator"

albumen — Sun, 14 Jun 2026 15:11:20 +0000

But then it wouldn’t work on a touchscreen, and it wouldn’t go viral.

New comment by albumen in "I'm Tired of Talking to AI"

albumen — Wed, 27 May 2026 11:49:40 +0000

Your evidence seems very anecdata. The graphite.io study does make an effort to quantify the false positive and false negative rates of the three detectors, rather than just saying “they work”. They generate 2000 ai articles and ask the detectors to evaluate them, measuring the false negatives (articles falsely IDd as human written); and they use a separate pre-AI dataset (years 2000-2022) to determine false positives.

New comment by albumen in "U.S. researchers face new restrictions on publishing with foreign collaborators"

albumen — Fri, 22 May 2026 19:11:38 +0000

What you’re seeing is the result of the USA voting in a party and president that made it clear beforehand that they were going to install puppet civil servants to do their will. Most other developed countries have avoided this scenario.

New comment by albumen in "I’ve joined Anthropic"

albumen — Tue, 19 May 2026 21:55:38 +0000

Those sources don’t claim Anthropic is crossing its red lines (AI-controlled weapons and mass domestic surveillance of American citizens).

New comment by albumen in "Joby kicks off NYC electric air taxi demos with historic JFK flight"

albumen — Thu, 30 Apr 2026 06:04:18 +0000

Other countries with good systems also have such people. America’s crime rate is far lower than the 1990s; the impression that you live in a crime-infested world is likely increased media coverage.

I think the real reason the US has poor public transit is that its transport landscape has been shaped by years of planning and funding decisions that have put the car first, and cities rebuilt accordingly. America’s enormity also makes nationwide PT more difficult (but not impossible).

Then add the meritocratic attitude that if you can’t afford a car it’s somehow your fault, and you end up with little political and societal interest in a good public transit system.

*https://ourworldindata.org/us-crime-rates

New comment by albumen in "Filing the corners off my MacBooks"

albumen — Sat, 11 Apr 2026 09:13:17 +0000

But the above criteria are mostly subjective, so objectivity largely doesn’t apply.

New comment by albumen in "Artemis II safely splashes down"

albumen — Sat, 11 Apr 2026 01:16:11 +0000

No, the plasma forms a teardrop shape around small craft like Orion, completely cutting off radio comms. Larger craft like starship or the shuttle which have a roughly cylindrical shape (vs Orion’s circular cross section) aren’t fully enclosed by the plasma. The shuttle had a transmitter attached to its tail for later flights, which could send back telemetry during re-entry.

New comment by albumen in "The best tools for sending an email if you go silent"

albumen — Tue, 07 Apr 2026 13:57:22 +0000

This feels like an AI-generated list of products with no actual hands-on time to let me get a feel if any of the services actually work vs their feature list. Revising the language/structure to not reek of AI would make me think more care had gone into it, and thus be more trustworthy.

New comment by albumen in "Understanding young news audiences at a time of rapid change"

albumen — Fri, 03 Apr 2026 18:29:32 +0000

I agree that attenborough’s documentaries are carefully composed, presumably to be suitable for a British family audience of the 1970s. You seem to uncharitably ascribe intentional malice to this approach rather than it being a product of its time and cultural values. For what it’s worth, I think his documentaries have done much more good (in raising awareness of the natural world and the need to conserve it) rather than harm.

But what I don’t understand is that you quote the OP article re climate change and racism, but then go off on a tangent re Attenborough? Sounds like you have an axe to grind.